Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Almost there!

Wow, I still can't believe how well we're doing. Still haven't had to really spend any extra money this month except the garage door, renewing the license plate and replenishing IPass. Right now if we keep going the rate we're going we stand to save $1850 this month! Holy cow! Over the course of a year that's a full time job! If we can do better the rest of the month-which I think we can since more than half the charges were the ones mentioned above, we could come in closer to $2000+ savings! As of right now I have made $275 selling things on ebay and through a local online garage sale. These things are almost exclusively toys and miscellaneous things I found around the house while doing a good purge. I'd like to continue on this saving and making money route we're on and we have some big things coming up in a few weeks. We're moving Libby to a big girl bed and potty training her. I still don't know if we are having another kid but right now we're not pregnant nor do we have any immediate plans to get pregnant. So I will probably have a few crib and changing table things to sell. And like I said, I think John and I plan to continue the no spending into February-with maybe a week break to stock up on essentials (like paper towels, cleaning supplies, vitamins, etc). We'd love to see a good few months of savings since we were hit hard this past year in expenses.

This past week for dinner we had a:

-Slow cooker pork roast. I had one in the freezer. Put it (frozen) in the crock. Salt, pepper and that's it. It let out its own juices and cooked for 9 hrs on low. Then I drained the juices, picked off all the fat I could and smothered it in BBQ sauce. We had that with a bag of frozen veggies (freezer) and twice baked potatoes. I had the potatoes and needed about $1 of extra ingredients.

-Took half the leftover meat and put it on a pizza crust ($2), sprinkled with cheese ($1) and BBQ sauce. We had a side salad with that incredibly good pizza!

-Tonight the rest of the meat with some condiments (like soy sauce, BBQ sauce, etc.) served over noodles and some frozen peas and carrots (from the freezer). BBQ pork noodle bowl. Only had to buy one box of pasta ($1).

-This weekend I have some frozen waffles (homemade whole wheat pumpkin) that we'll have with scrabbled eggs. Our eggs are pretty expensive but still only about $2 worth of extra ingredients.

-Finally I'll make a soup with the rest of my frozen pumpkin (which was completely free-remember my rotten pumpkin from Halloween '12? Threw it in the garden as compost and the next summer had 3 plants grow! Got 4 big pumpkins out of it and made the equivalent of 20 cans of pumpkin!), can of black beans, veggie stock (that I make free from scraps-like carrot peelings, onion ends, etc-in the slow cooker). I only had to buy a can of tomatoes. A huge pot of soup for less than $1 in extra ingredients!

I'm so glad this month has gone so well. I do have to admit that cold weather, snow and a germaphobic mom (me) has made it easier since we really haven't gone anywhere this month.